Cronos history: Monaco, Crypto.com and 70 billion tokens
Monaco buys a domain
The company started in Hong Kong in 2016 as Monaco, a startup selling a crypto debit card; Kris Marszalek was among its founders. In July 2018 it bought the crypto.com domain from cryptographer Matt Blaze, who had registered it in 1993, and renamed itself Crypto.com; neither side disclosed the price. CRO followed in November 2018 with a supply of 100 billion tokens.
The largest burn in history
In February 2021 Crypto.com announced it would burn 70 billion CRO and called it the largest token burn in history. The stated aim was to decentralise the network ahead of the Crypto.org Chain launch.
November 2021: a chain and an arena
On 8 November 2021 the Cronos chain went live in beta. It runs smart contracts written for Ethereum. Nine days later Crypto.com bought the naming rights to the Los Angeles arena for 20 years, at a reported price of over 700 million dollars. CRO set its all-time high of 0.8915 dollars on 23 November 2021. In February 2022 Crypto.com renamed the token Cronos and kept the CRO ticker.
The burned tokens come back
In March 2025 validators voted on a proposal to reissue the 70 billion CRO burned in 2021 and place them in a strategic reserve wallet with multi-year vesting. Most early voters rejected it, yet a few large validators carried the proposal on 17 March, The Block reported. Critics said it broke the promise behind the original burn.